Slogan’s that don’t make sense:

Below is a summary of things that people often say that never get questioned, although they make very little sense, if any at all.

“This is a Wild Goose Chase”

Often, when someone meets an unconquerable clerical challenge, or otherwise gets the preverbal “run-around” while trying to accomplish something, they will deem that task to be “A Wild Goose Chase”. This terminology must have originated a long time ago, when wild geese were difficult to come by. Nowadays, in 2011, you give me a net and point me toward a parking lot; and I will get you a wild goose in thirty minutes or less. From my ample experiences with wild geese, they are not difficult to come by, nor are they very elusive when put in situations where they are threatened (IE: driving directly at them in a golf cart), and are incredibly stupid animals. Their only defense mechanism is their ability to hiss at you while trying to move their fat asses out of your way at .05 miles per hour. So while the term “Wild Goose Chase” may have made sense in some bygone, goose deprived era, I no longer feel like it accurately represents a difficult to attain goal.

“It is what it is:”

You’re better off saying nothing. Because that is what this phrase equates to…. nothing. Someone who says “it is what it is” minus well have just burped in your face. At least if he had done that, there would have been comedic value involved. To me, “It is what it is” is the verbal equivalent to flinging a spoonful of mashed potatoes into someone’s hair. To me, when someone says “It is what it is” they are doing nothing but proving that they are lazy and unable to think of anything else to say while feeling like they should say something rather than nothing.

“Boy Bill, my cable keeps going out on me”

“Well, it is what it is Matt”

“Well why don’t you eat shit Bill?”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass”

Now I understand that this is a phrase one uses to express how little they care about a given topic. However, has anyone ever wanted a rat’s ass in exchange for information on a topic?

“Tim, do you have the documents on our ROI in the Asian sector?”

“Yeah, do you have that rat’s ass that I asked for?”

Now I understand how you don’t care about something, and I am fine with that as there is a veritable cornucopia of things out there that I don’t care about, but do we need to keep invoking that visual? When you say that, I have to think about a rat’s ass.

“It doesn’t matter if you win or lose as long as you have fun”

Then why practice? Why would anyone practice if winning wasn’t important? Why even bother playing anything? The idea of competition is to come out of it with a winner and a loser. Losing teaches people to want to win instead. If you take that away, which we already have, kids lose an important life lesson about how awful losing is and how awesome winning is. Now, thanks largely to this dumbass phrase, everyone gets a trophy, win or lose. When I was a kid and I lost, I was forced by my coach and my parents to stand there and watch a bunch of other kids walk away with their trophies. And you know what, it didn’t make me feel left out, it pissed me off and the next time I played that team, I threw the first pitch at their lead off batters head, and we played better and we won, and THAT was fun.

“Follow your dreams”

For real? I should follow my dreams? I feel like that would turn out to be a devastating decision for me. So I should strive to have an arm wrestling tournament in the basement of my grandmother’s house In Ohio, with Danny Devito and Cedric the Entertainer while the entire place is flooding with water and for some unexplained reason a bunch of wild dogs keep showing up and attacking people? That’s what I should be doing?

I understand the meaning is to follow your dreams in life. However I also have a lot of problems with this thinking. I would have loved to become a fighter pilot, but eventually the reality set in, that I can’t see anything. So should I still follow those dreams? How is that going to work out for me? You think the Navy is looking for any borderline blind fighter pilots to go dropping bombs on things?

“When life hands you lemon’s, you make lemonade”

There’s nothing like teaching people to accept failure. You shouldn’t enjoy something bad that happens to you. You should get in front of your problems before life has a chance to “hand you lemons”.

This phrase, to me, falls under a long list of things that people tell one another when they are trying to cheer you up. These are the worst phrases in the world because they are always being lectured to you, when you are in some sort of seriously shitty situation. Other phrases in this category are “The night is always darkest before the dawn”, “The grass is always greener on the other side”, “Don’t cry over spilled milk”. There are dozens more, none of which seem to work when someone is forcibly removed from their foreclosed home or finds out their spouse is banging the milk man. But people just keep saying them to one another, hoping that someday, “You’ve got to pull yourself up with your boot straps”, will magically help a guy whose uninsured home burnt to the ground, twenty minutes ago, feel completely better about his outlook on life.

If life handed me a lemon, I would slice it in half and squirt it life’s eyes.

“The only stupid questions are those which go unasked”

I couldn’t disagree more; there are plenty of really stupid questions that people are somehow never ashamed to ask you on a near daily basis. Anyone who believes in the above phrase should spend one hour working in some sort of an IT related Call Center and I think they would come out of that feeling differently.

“Someone shoved a donut in my printer and I cleaned most of it out with 409 but why won’t it work now?”

“What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger”

Really? So what if you get all four of your arms and legs blown off in some sort of horrific accident? And by some miracle you managed to live? You would be stronger after that? At that point, you’re pretty much just a punching bag that can talk while someone feeds you mashed potatoes. .

This is one of many examples with which we can prove this phrase to be dubious.

What if someone breaks into your house and steals every last thing out of your home, and then steals your identify and spends all of your money and ruins your credit for decades, you lose your home, your cars, you’re wife leaves and takes your kids and marries someone you hated from your past just because she is desperate for money? That somehow leads to you becoming stronger? I’m pretty sure most of the time that leads to homicide.

“Pain is just weakness leaving the body”

Yeah whatever you say there Captain Tough Nuts. How about, I don’t really feel like being in any pain, all day and forever after that? What is that like the battle slogan for masochism? To me, I don’t find people who drive themselves to be in physical pain to be tough or particularly strong people. I pretty much just dismiss them as idiots. There is no sense in explaining to them how pain is your nervous systems way of telling you to immediately put an end to whatever is making it feel that way. 

You hear this phrase a lot at the gym as one neck-less freak often says it to another as they attempt to lift way more weight than their human bones and ligaments were ever designed to handle. Every time I hear some beef bus at the gym say this, I imagine if they would say the same thing if they got an arm ripped off by a kodiak bear. Somehow I doubt it.


To conclude this tirade, people just say things without ever stopping and thinking about what it is they’re saying. This is the world we live in, and these are the hands we’re given. Let’s use them and let’s start trying, to make this a world worth fighting for.